The Human Appendix

When I was seventeen, I had the following conversation about meat with a classmate at school:

“No, you know – muscle tissue. That’s the bit of an animal that we eat – its muscles.”
“Is it? Gross!”
“Well what part did you think we eat?”
“Just the… stuff… you know, the stuff that goes in between all the other bits…”

There’s no such thing as a human appendix.

In my fellow 17-year-old’s mind, “meat” was some extra type of generic body tissue that served no purpose other than to be cut out and eaten by humans.

I think back on that and laugh at how stupid teenagers are, but there are plenty of grown adults who have the same attitude towards “bureaucrats” – in many people’s minds there is a class of employee who performs no function other than to be fired for cost-cutting purposes. Even putting aside the pedantic observation that, technically, anyone who works at a desk is a bureaucrat, this attitude is obviously wrong – as The Dim Post notes, in real life when you ditch 150 bureaucrats, shit happens.*

Sure, there are lazy employees, there are employees who don’t have enough work to keep them busy, and there may be employees whose positions are now redundant and no-one’s noticed yet, but by and large people are in jobs for a reason. There’s no such thing as a human appendix.

Well, no, of course there is such a thing as a human appendix – I meant, like, a human who is an appendix, like someone who used to do something useful but doesn’t anymore and can be safely fired like you can remove an appendix no you’ve been drinking what

*Note to self: Make SHIT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FIRE BUREAUCRATS T-shirts in the style of the SHIT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PARTY NAKED T-shirt from Bad Santa. Market them to left-wingers; fail to become fantastically wealthy.